Coming of Age: Three Novellas (Dark Suspense, Gothic Thriller, Supernatural Horror)

by Douglas Clegg

  And even as he said this, he thought he heard the god’s name in the song, Xipe Totec, Xipe Totec.

  What was it for? Why did it do this? For the first time, Josh wondered if there wasn’t some insane logic to the creature’s ritual. It wasn’t just a monster from nowhere. It had been stolen from its resting place, somewhere in Mexico. It had been wrenched from its burial ground, and brought up here by some moron who decided to make a buck off it—or seventy-five cents—and forget that it was sacred.

  He said it aloud. “Scratch is sacred.”

  “What?” Bronwyn asked, as if he were losing more marbles than he had moments before.

  “That thing is a representation of a god. Xipe Totec. The Flayer of Men. We’re seeing an ancient ceremony.”

  “Christ, you’re starting to make sense.”

  “I don’t know what good it does us unless you can remember what was on those signs. What else was written there,” Josh said.

  “We can make it to the pick-up truck,” Tammy said. “If we run. We can.”

  “No,” Josh said. “We can’t. It’s too far. That thing is right there, Tammy.”

  “If all three of us go,” Tammy said. “It’ll only get one of us.”

  “Who will it be? You? Me? Bron? You can live with that?”

  “Either that or we all die sitting here.”

  “We’re safe here,” Josh said. He reached back over his seat and touched her gently on the knee. “Tammy, just hang in there. I don’t think it can get in the car. It may need night for its ritual. It may not be after us during the day.”

  “Or maybe it just doesn’t stop,” Tammy said. “What about that? Maybe it’ll be morning soon and that thing will still be waiting to get us. Or maybe it’ll figure out how to scratch its way through the car. Maybe.”

  “Tammy, listen to Josh,” Bronwyn said. “We’ve all been through a big shock. But it hasn’t gotten to us here.”

  “The battery in that truck is going to die. Sometime in the next hour or two,” Tammy said. “If we don’t get out and make a run for it, we may never get out of here. We are already dead, if you think about it. We just haven’t had our moment with that monster.”

  The singing in front of the car continued, and the creature they had all begun to think of as Scratch waved its claws to the sky as if talking directly to its god.

  Perhaps an hour went by before the headlights of Dave Olshaker’s truck flickered a bit. Then, they dimmed. Scratch had gone off into the darkness somewhere, and Josh guessed that it was either under the pick-up or under the Pimpmobile.

  “We can sit here and die, or…” Tammy said, after they’d all been too quiet and too tense and too watchful for too long. It was a surprise to hear her voice.

  More of a surprise, she opened her door, and jumped out in the dirt, slamming the door behind her.

  Before they could say anything, she was running in the dimming headlights for the pick-up truck. Josh held his breath, watching her, but he was sure he saw her open the driver’s door and slam it again. He heard her shouts of joy. “I’m inside! I’m inside!”

  And then, she flicked on the truck’s interior light to see the layout of keys and pedals.

  And Bronwyn said what Josh was thinking. “Oh shit. Oh shit!”

  The truck was moving forward, toward them, and Tammy had a big grin on her face like all her prayers had been answered.

  But Bronwyn and Josh both saw some little movement in the back of the cab of the truck.

  It was in there, with her.

  Josh opened his door, with Bronwyn shouting at him. He ran toward the truck. By the time he reached Tammy’s side, Scratch had already began throwing her around, and when Josh opened the door, it had dragged her out the opposite window, trailing blood.

  The whole time, Tammy hadn’t screamed. He was sure that the last look on her face had been, not one of terror, but of submission.

  She hadn’t even fought.

  Perhaps she couldn’t have fought.

  He’d never know.

  Then, twenty minutes later, out in the darkness, they heard Tammy’s last shrill scream, although they couldn’t be sure that it was Tammy or simply Scratch imitating her voice.

  Josh ran back to the Pimpmobile, and had to pull Bronwyn out of the backseat. “We can get out, let’s go,” he said. They ran back to the truck, climbing up, sat on the seat, and Josh put the truck in first gear, and it moved forward.

  “It’s over,” Bronwyn said. “We can go. We can help. Oh thank god. Thank you, God. Thank you.”

  But they got just about a mile past the ring of fire they’d created, and the pick-up truck died.

  “It’s the battery,” he said.

  The headlights dimmed to nothingness. They rolled up both windows, locked the doors, checked to make sure everything in the cab was secure.

  Exhausted, they folded into one another. Josh managed to close his eyes for a few minutes and not think of the horror.

  Now and then, he awoke, because Scratch’s claws raked around the side of the pick-up truck. They had no light. He’d left the gun and flashlight back in the Pimpmobile. Maybe the Bic lighter was something, but he didn’t want to waste it.

  It was only two hours until dawn. He and Bronwyn sat up, and kept watch, but Bronwyn told him it might be better if they slept. “Maybe in our sleep, when it kills us, it won’t be so bad.”

  “What if this is it?” Bronwyn asked. It was still dark—an endless night.

  “It what?”

  “It. Our last night on this earth. What if we don’t get out. What if that thing kills us both?”

  “You can’t believe it. You can’t. There’s a way.”

  “I wonder if Griff thought that. Or Tammy. Or Ziggy.” She lit what must’ve been her twentieth cigarette of the night. “It’s like we’re drowning in the ocean and there’s a great white shark coming at us. Instead of water, all this dirt. What if this is it?”

  Then, she lowered the cigarette and leaned into him. Kissed him. Her lips were soft, dry, and yet somehow he felt moistened by them. She looked at him steadily. She no longer looked like a college girl. She no longer looked like a girl he was interested in. She looked like a woman who was preparing for something. And he knew what it was. Not death. But sex. Warmth. Lust.

  Something human and animal, hot and cold at the same time, something nearly predatory, seemed to take over within him. He kissed her again, tasting the ashes of her smoky breath, and then he reached around and held her, pressing himself close, and she moved gently against him.

  If his mind warned him against this, it somehow froze in silence, and his body took over. They wrapped around each other, and she pushed him backward. She was all over him, and he scrambled against her, and soon they were thrusting, and licking, as uncomfortable as the truck was, and he felt as if it was like his dream: the two of them in a great green forest. He entered her body, he felt an intense warm wet embrace, and it shot the feeling up his spine right into his skull—a ripple of lightning—as she tossed and twisted her body to accommodate him and enjoy the breadth of his flesh. He kissed her neck as she twisted around so that he was now behind her, grasping her breasts in his hands, his lower body thrusting faster and faster, and she was moaning and whispering “yeah, oh, yeah, oh, oh,” and then a slamming wave of thrusts ended as he reached his climax, as she reached hers, as they fell on top of each other, sweaty, burning, drained, full.

  Afterward, he remembered too much, and drew back from her. Had it been a dream, after all? Had he dreamt that he’d made love to her? He wasn’t sure. Is that what people do when monsters are after them? They take a break to mate? They bond sexually so that they can face death more easily? He felt older than he wanted to feel. He felt as if he’d crossed some great chasm in life—and looking back at his life before that night, it had all seemed pampered and silly and wasteful. Life and death were too important to play around with now. Even college seemed ridiculous—another ceremonial dance like the one Scratch
had done for them. It was not about life and the struggle to survive one single night when faced with danger. He went to pull his clothes back on, and she came up behind him, kissing him on the neck. “I’m glad we did that,” she said.

  “Me, three,” he joked.

  “You love me, don’t you?”

  He didn’t respond. Then, he thought better of it. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s not good to be in love at a time like this.” Then, she laughed. “Oh my god, the sun!”

  And it was true. To the east, a lighter purple came up, bringing with it a misty halo around the mesas and mountains.

  “I don’t want to die!” she shouted to the still-lingering dark blue sky.

  “Me, neither!” he shouted.

  “I want to live, goddamn it!”

  “Me, too!”

  “I want to get middle-aged and fat and watch bad TV and raise four kids into neurotic adults and I want to see China and learn how to water ski!”

  “I want to grow old and die in a nursing home!” he shouted. “No, I want to die when I step off the curb in a big city, and a crazy taxi driver comes out of nowhere and hits me so that I bounce off the rest of the cars going too fast through the yellow light!”

  “I want to die with my head in a bowl of green pea puree, with my Depends on, with only three teeth in my mouth!” she shouted, laughing.

  Then, they got quiet again.

  He closed his eyes, and said a prayer.

  “Know what?”

  “What’s that?”

  “This is a bad dream,” she said. “I bet that’s all it is. I bet I’m sleeping on the lawn, with you. Hungover. I bet it’s the Saturday we left campus. The bitch of it is trying to wake up.”

  The day had officially begun, with the sun stretching molten gold an hour later. Heat came up too suddenly.

  Bronwyn took a drag off the cigarette. Rolled down the window.

  “Bron, it may still be out there,” he said.

  “It’s a creature of the night, that’s what the sign said, ‘the Sun God is its enemy’,” she grinned, and then looked a little grim. He practically could read her mind: it was ridiculous to feel happy after the carnage. But they did. Both of them did. They’d survived the night. She held her cigarette up in the morning air. She leaned back, and looked up at the vague sun, melted as it was into a pure yellow sky.

  “If it’s still out here, maybe it’s sleeping.”

  “It doesn’t sleep,” she said. She puffed out dragon breath. Sucked on the cigarette until it nearly disappeared between her lips. “I wonder what it’s all about?”

  “The creature?”

  “No,” she said, her voice carrying the quality of Ziggy when he was at his most stoned. She was ragged, and when he looked at her, he thought she was beautiful despite the circles around her eyes and the skin drawn tight around her lips. “No, you know how life is this thing? This thing that you grow up doing because you think one day…one day you’ll get to this…I don’t know…”

  “Wisdom?”

  “Yeah. Wisdom. Knowledge. You’ve known something because there’s this key you turn, and you don’t get the key or even know which door to go to when you’re a kid. You assume grownups have it. You assume education brings it to you. Or experience. And then, here we are. You believe in God, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I don’t. Not at all. I used to think all religion was just bullshit. But after last night, I started thinking that maybe people came up with God and religion to give hope. That hope isn’t a real thing, but people need it because otherwise…otherwise, life is just this jungle where you wait to see what ends up jumping out of nowhere and eating you. And you have God, you have order. You have a reason. You have hope.”

  “Sometimes when I’m not sure I believe in God, I think of goodness.”

  She glanced over at him.

  “That’s all God is. Goodness. That there’s goodness here. On earth. That it’s our job to find it. To create it. To keep it going. Like a flame, in your hand. Like a little fire everyone can hold, if they want to. And it means fighting sometimes. It means standing up to darkness.”

  Bronwyn sat up, leaning forward. “On that note, I have to go take a leak,” she said. She opened the door, and slid down out of the truck. He gasped for a second, his heart seeming to leap out of his chest. But nothing happened. No Scratch showed up suddenly, its claws extended.

  Then, she squatted down beside the truck. “Don’t see any monsters under here,” she said. He looked the other way to give her a little privacy. He had to go pee, too, so he got out and went around, peeing on a sagebrush.

  Then, they found the cooler with Coke and even some Twinkies in the back of the truck. They devoured these like it was the finest meal in existence.

  Then, they saw the siphon and the red plastic gas tank sitting at one end of the truck.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “Wow is right,” she added. “I guess we have Dave to thank for this.”

  “We’re all to blame,” he said. “All of us.”

  “We’re probably going to die,” she said, mid-Twinkie.

  “Everybody dies.”

  They had begun walking back to the Pimpmobile to put what Josh had called “Plan B” into effect. He lugged the full plastic gas container, and she held the siphon and an extra Twinkie.

  “Is that okay by you?” she asked.

  “No. It’s not okay. Today is not our day to die. That’s all I know,” Josh said. “This is not the day.”

  “They’re all dead. All of them,” she said.

  “Maybe last night was their night. Maybe it was,” Josh said. He swallowed a little dust, but felt better. Felt fear leaving his body as if through sheer force of will. “I’m not going to give in to this. We are alive now. We have some water. It can’t be more than 20 miles out to the highway. Twenty miles is do-able. Two gallons of gas will get us there.”

  “It’s going to be hot as hell in an hour. Or less.”

  “So we’ll get sunburnt.”

  “And it’s going to find us.”

  “We don’t know that. Are you just going to wait around, Bronwyn? Are you going to just sit there and let that thing tear you up like you were bait for a mountain lion? Think of it as a mountain lion. Don’t get psyched by its claws. Or how we saw it at that gas station. We haven’t seen it fly. It hasn’t grown nine feet tall. It’s little. Sure, it’s fast. It’s smart, maybe. Maybe not. But whatever you and I have, whatever is buried inside us that’s going to come out someday…someday, years from now…I mean, what if you are destined to be a hero of life? What if I am? What if you go on to medical school and get into research and become the first doctor to cure cancer? What if I go on to write the book that changes lives? Is it worth us giving up now to this stupid little nasty monstrous…piece of shit? Are we going to let it win just because we’re afraid? Are we?”

  She stopped and took a step back, looking at him in a way that made him feel as if he were from another planet. “I’ve never seen you like this.”

  He sighed, but felt a steely resolve take him over. “I’ve never had to be like this.”

  Everything hurt inside him, every bit of him felt raw and raked, but he locked into the mindset that he knew he had to have.

  Then, the Pimpmobile came into view.

  Bronwyn dropped the siphon when she saw what had happened to it.

  Scratch had been busy in the night. The Pimpmobile’s doors were off their hinges. The trunk was open, and all the crap from it was spread out on the ground.

  Worse, as they got closer, the interior was ripped to shreds, and wires had been pulled and cut.

  And the keys were gone.

  “You know,” Bronwyn said. “I think we better start walking while we still have Twinkies in us.”

  Josh set down the gas, and sat on the shredded backseat and began weeping like a baby. "It's all bullshit," he said. “We're no heroes. We're just fu
cked. That's all we are. Fucked."

  Bronwyn put her arms around him and whispered, “Come on. Let’s go. We’ll get away from it. We have the whole day.”

  He felt better on the walk. He kept apologizing for his little breakdown, and she kept telling him to shut up about it.

  “Okay, what do we know about it?” he asked.

  “It skins people, ” she said. “Oh, and it woke up because of your blood. ”

  “Yeah.” Josh grimaced. “I hate thinking about that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “It's not nothing. Tell me.”

  “I think maybe...maybe it's connected to me now. Because of my blood.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Maybe I'm wrong,” he said.

  They walked side by side, Bronwyn with a slight limp, but she leaned on him now and then. She guesstimated a general southwesterly direction to the main highway, although all they could see for miles was just more desert and mesas and arroyos and caverns and mountains in nearly every direction.

  They stuck to the road.

  “You studied the Aztecs, didn’t you?” he asked.

  “I read a book. I didn’t exactly study them. I just don’t remember the details,” she said. “Anyway, I'm not sure this is some Aztec monster. It's easy to blame the Aztecs for everything. It's what history books do.”

  “Let's assume it's Aztec-ish, anway.”

  “Okay.”

  "Remember. Force yourself to remember. You have to.”

  She stopped, closed her eyes.

  “I can’t.”

  “You can. What was on the cover?”

  “An Aztec Calendar.”

  “Good. So it was a round flat stone and had a face on it.”

  “Something like that.”

  “First page?”

  “I don’t think that thing is really from the ancient Aztecs,” she said. “It’s something else. They just made up all the stuff.”

  “Well, we know it hates the sun. And it loves the dark. And it skins people. And drinks blood.”